People Get Overconfident Too Quickly in the IT Industry

Hello friends,

Ego is a dangerous thing.

The moment you start getting proud of your skills, you stop learning—and that's exactly where your knowledge starts to decline.

In the IT industry, I’ve often noticed that once someone gains even a little professional experience, they begin to think they know it all.

Let me share an example.

Once, I was speaking with someone who had around 2.5 years of experience.
He asked me, "Do you know the difference between call by value and call by reference?"

I replied:

Call by value means passing a copy of the variable’s value to a method.
Call by reference means passing access to the original memory location, so changes made inside the method affect the original variable.

Then he asked, “What kind of language is Java?”
I answered, “Java is strictly call by value.”

At that point, he challenged me.
He said, “But if I pass an object to a method, and the method updates one of its fields, those changes are reflected after the method call. Doesn’t that mean it’s call by reference?”

I didn’t say anything, but I thought to myself:

Yes, objects in Java are passed by value, but the value being passed is the reference to the object, not the actual object. So, if the method modifies the object’s internal state, the change is visible outside.
However, the reference itself is still passed by value—if you assign a new object to that reference inside the method, it won't change the original reference outside the method.

This is a common misunderstanding among developers—even those with experience.

In that moment, I realized that although this person had more years on paper, I understood Java more deeply.

I didn’t argue with him—there was no point.
But it became clear to me that my technical depth had outgrown the level of the company I was working at.

So after gaining a bit more experience, I made a move to a product-based company.

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💡 The Lesson

Never let your experience turn into arrogance.
Your knowledge is never complete—and you can always be wrong.

No matter how many years you’ve worked, stay curious, stay humble, and keep learning.

After all, we’re all human. And to err is human.

Got it?